Our most sincere thanks to all our community for continuing to support us during 2016 with our latest releases. It's thanks to you guys that we can continue to develop new exciting projects, so again, a huge thanks from our part!

Hoping 2017 will be a great year with Rock of Ages 2 and other secret stuff in the horizon!

To celebrate the end of the year we wanted to run a small contest where winners will be participating for a cool Rock of Ages 2 themed notepad. Ideal to take your 2017 notes and have all your friends green with envy. All notepads will also include a little surprise inside!

To participate all you have to do is be a member of the Rock of Ages 2 hub. In addition, if you wishlist the game on Steam your chances of winning are twice as good!!

Hey guys. Welcome to a new defensive unit overview. This time we'll be looking at the updated Battleship.

Same or not?

The battleship serves a similar purpose to that of the original Rock of Ages. The unit fires in to the air and the projectile briefly lands near you in a mortar-like vertical angle, trying to anticipate your location. However, the cannonball shot features some new dynamics that make it more useful as an obstacle and the visual redesign is meant to reflect this.

Shells or land mines?

The vertical shot is meant to land directly on the boulder for highest damage, but if the shot misses, it can still deal damage in the form of a temporary land mine.

Bombarded with 'cannon shells'

The cannonballs that hit the surface burry half way in to the ground. While they are there they act as mines. Boulders that roll on top of exposed shells will cause these to explode. Additionally, buried shots start to gain pressure and explode after a few seconds.

Land mine mechanic: Cannonballs that burry in to the ground explode briefly after.

Just like in the first game, when the battleship prepares to fire it will be accompanied by a visual and audio cue. The destination impact point is signaled by an animated reticule so players can attempt to dodge the falling projectile. Falling shots will also leave a trial of smoke so other players can visualize the projectile's trajectory from far away distances.

Missed me by a hair!

The visuals

One of the things we wanted to convey with the new design is a more clear representation of the vertical attack. The old unit felt like it "spawned" projectiles out of thin air, and even though this is actually how the game executes the attack, it seemed important to create the illusion that there is an actual mortar-like arced shot.

The massive four cannons that are located on the ship in a radial like pattern show that the unit is aiming towards the sky. The cannon facing the targeted boulder wills always be the cannon that fires. The fire animation is quite dramatic, so even if you're not playing with audio you'll be able to prepare for the imminent reticule to show up.

It's curious that while we were preparing this blog post we quickly realized something was missing from the battleship when comparing it to the older design: COLORS!

Battleship from RoA on the left. Battleship from RoA2 on the right.

It's incredible what some nice colors can do to compliment a design. Even if the older unit has less polygons and simpler lighting/shading it looks much more interesting. So the next step will be to complement the existing design with color coding which will not only improve the overall aesthetics but also allow the unit to display your team's color selection.

Look forward to screenshots of a more colorful battleship once we include color coding to the materials.

And that's it for today! We hope everyone enjoys this content update that was a bit overdue. Until the next time!

Rock of Ages is a race to destroy the enemy castle gates (and then squishing the opponent's puny leader with your boulder), so it is important to design levels that are clear to navigate.

Worlds collide!

One innovation we brought to the level designs is that your territory and the enemy territory sometimes intersect. This gives you the opportunity to collide with the enemy boulders on your way down, but it also means we have to give some additional cues so players always know when they are going towards the enemy castle or their own!

The first and most important hint, is of course, the team colors! We do not have a fixed red vs blue palette anymore, so the tracks and many details including units, people, flags, boulders and castles, will all change to use your selected army color and banner. We are starting with 10 colors to choose from.

If two players are using the same settings?

We need to do something when two players have the same preferred colors, so if two red armies meet, whoever enters the battle last will have their main and detail colors swapped (in the above example that player would have a yellow banner with red lions).

More cuesA great hint we had in Rock of Ages that helped players find the right direction, specially when they fell off the track or got disoriented, was the wind:

The wind is not only decorative, but it always blows towards the enemy castle. Even without telling the player in a tutorial, we found it was one of those subtle things that people got intuitively.

This way please.

Not all hints need to be subtle though... a finger pointing in the right direction just works

I have an answer for that!

It's because you don't want to win because your enemy didn't know where to go. You want to win because they couldn't get through your cunning defensive strategies!

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Now that we are play-testing very often, we have had the chance to fine tune the level design; block or enable shortcuts, set which tiles players can build on, calibrate boulders and units, etc. We'll continue do this, always remembering that the priority is to make a fair and fun game.

By now you may know that in Rock of Ages II different boulders have different attributes, and you can choose unique ones to play in your matches.

Today we will talk about the Balloon Boulders...

The main advantage that Balloon Boulders have is pretty clear: They are light which allows them to jump higher. Balloon boulders can jump obstacles that regular boulders would need to go through, losing health & speed.

I know what you're thinking: That's OP! One of the big complaints about Rock of Ages 1 was it was too easy to jump over obstacles! But don't worry, there are three things to consider here:

In general regular boulders jump less high than in the first game. (So jumping has been nerfed a bit).

Many units are taller than in ROA 1 (like the elephant that now has a tower), which makes jumping over stuff even harder.

The Balloon Boulder has very clear weaknesses...

As you can see, the balloon boulder isn't very fast, nor resistant. It's weight class also means it deals less damage to the gate (and all enemies). In a game where speed and strength are incredibly important, having two weak stats is not so good. The balloon boulder is actually a good secondary boulder because:

It can get past super well defended areas and clear the path for your friend.

It can reach shortcuts that can be much harder to achieve for regular boulders.

In our current matches people who are depending too much on the balloon boulders are losing most of the time. They are too weak, which makes them very vulnerable to projectile weapons like the Ballista.

Here are the two Balloon class boulders of the game. What's that on the left? An inflated cow?!?

The Balloon Boulders are definitely a very fun addition to the game. They add an interesting layer of strategy and decision making when preparing for a war match, and are unique and feel different to the other boulders of Rock of Ages II. But the thing I've enjoyed the most about them is seeing them pop in the middle of the air after I get overwhelmed by a nasty projectile defense. Seeing an inflated cow burst like a balloon has made me laugh out loud several times already, and I hope it will also make you laugh as well.

In Rock of Ages 2 we wanted to introduce a wider variety of units for players to choose from. But by introducing so many units we quickly realized that managing such a big roster in a match would be very troublesome. Because we also wanted to introduce new areas where players are required to plan out their strategy, we decided it would be a really good idea to limit the amount of units you can bring to a battle by making players commit to a specific battle plan.

Before each War match takes place you will have to select which units and which boulders you want to bring to the course. Below is the unit selection grid in its default configuration:

Progressing through the campaign will allow players to unlock and populate the unit selection grid with more boulders and new units. In addition, players will also be able to unlock additional slots so they can bring more units in to a match. The upper grid represents the slots available for your battle plan and the bottom grid shows the complete list of units to pick from.

A completely unlocked list will look like this:

We don't want to give away all the units from the game, so we've blurred out some of the icons. Can you guess what they might be???

Marble madness

You might have noted from the last screenshot that there's something else that is new in the sequel; you can bring more than one boulder to the fight!

We don't want to impose how players want to plan out their battles, so we decided to give complete freedom when selecting the roster. This means you can take as much boulders as your battle plan allows you to. Note that boulders will take up two spaces from the top grid, so choosing too many can severely limit the amount of defensive units you can use. It's all about balancing and making the proper choices for each course.

Choose the boulder you will release for the next run. Note that each boulder has its own building time. Tougher rocks will generally take longer to build.

After all players have selected their roster the match can begin. Because the game allows you to choose more than one boulder, if you do so, you will have to first choose which of these you want to start building while you plan out your defenses.

Wrapping-up

With a limited selection of units we anticipate a much higher level of experimentation from players that can try out different combinations on different levels. The roster that might prove to be effective on one map may not be as effective on another level, so players will have to choose wisely and develop their own strategies.

We also believe that the more limited amount of active units in a match will allow people to be more focused on setting up defenses that are better planned out giving the game more diversity (you'll never know what you have to face off the next time).

Finally, this formula also incentives more variety of strategic approaches to be used during a match. Some players can use rosters that are clearly more offensive, with more weight on boulder selections, and other players can rely on more defensive strategies with a wider assortment of defenses to protect the course. And since the game now allows players to team up, the expected variety in a match can be exponential, with teams going all-aggressive, all-defensive or mixes.

Building phase in progress. Note that in our current build 'banks' and 'thunder cloud' are always added to your roster, but this is still TBD.

We hope everyone likes the new ideas we're developing for the sequel. We can't wait to see what kind of strategies people will develop once the game is out.

In Rock of Ages 2 we have a greater variety of boulders, so we figured we could associate one new boulder to every character you find in Story mode. Every time you defeat a new army leader you win their boulder which you can later use in your next matches.

A scene from 'Clash of the Titans'...

The Medusa boulder is made of unfortunate greek heroes who were sent to kill Medusa; they all of course looked at her and turned into stone. It's funny to imagine how Medusa would arrange for soldiers to petrify in specific poses, each one like a puzzle piece she can use to build a giant boulder.

...And to solve the soldier puzzle ourselves, we used M.C. Escher's repeating patterns as a reference.

Left image: M. C. Escher

By designing a couple of interlocking tiles, you can repeat the pattern as much as you like.

To make these types of repeating patterns, it is helpful to start with just the structure and then complicate the edges. It has to be said that it is easier to make these type of patterns today because you can have your software modify all the rotated copies of a tile simultaneously as you are working on just one. Doing this without a computer would have been way more challenging!

Finally, we used a simpler tile structure because the previous one was not designed to wrap around a sphere... oops!

Here's how the final result looks like:

Dramatic screenshot!!!

Enjoyed this new boulder? The game will feature a wider variety of new boulder designs, some which will have unique special properties (more on this in a future post). We'll keep on covering new boulders and more units in upcoming updates.